"IT was getting dark so suddenly that Alice thought there must be a thunderstorm coming on. `What a thick black cloud that is!' she said. `And how fast it comes! Why, I do believe it's got wings!" The cloud, you may remember, was the metaphorical gathering of the powers of darkness as the Tweedle brothers in Alice Through the Looking-Glass prepared for war:
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said
Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new
rattle.
The passage is just one of the many references to weather in the voluminous writings of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University and better known to posterity as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonder- land and many other nonsense tales.
Dodgson was born in 1832, and the great success of his fantastic stories has been attributed to the fact that, unlike most material for children at the time, they had no obvious moral to them and did not claim to teach anything. He was a keen amateur photographer, with a particular interest - nowadays looked at askance, it must be said - in photographing young girls, whose friendship, we are told, he valued very highly. He died 100 years ago today, on January 14th, 1898.
Whatever Dodgson's motivation, Alice's troubles with the weather in the looking-glass seem innocent enough. For instance, when a giant crow swept down upon her, Alice "ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. `It can never get me here' she thought. But I wish it wouldn't flap its wings so much - it make quite a hurricane in the wood'."
And later in the story the Queen, too, has problems with the wind - but in the Looking-Glass world any difficulties are very easily solved: "A sudden gust of wind blew the Queen's shawl across a little brook. She spread out her arms, and went flying after it, and this time she succeeded in catching it for herself."
Alice becomes more lyrical when the subject is a shower of snow: "Do you hear the snow against the window-panes?" she asks her cat. "How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if someone was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says `Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again'."
Perhaps, as Alice herself said: "Everything's got a moral, if you can only find it."